Philippe Beck: The <i>CounterText</i> Interview

Philippe Beck is a poet, theorist, translator, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nantes. In 2015, he received the Grand Prix de poésie from the Académie française for his body of work. Since Garde-manche hypocrite (1996), he has published over twenty poetry collections, the most recent of which are Ryrkaïpii (2023a) and Abstraite et plaisantine (2025a). His work creates spaces of encounter both with its own formal possibilities and with the other arts. If his poetry is concerned with the search for what he calls a ‘dry lyricism’ (‘lyrisme sec’), it is always because it remains occupied by, and with, the question of what it can do: what it can do when something has gone wrong, and in the face of catastrophe; what it can do before the ‘community in pain’ (‘communauté en peine’; see Beck 2025b) and for this community. At stake here are the roles of the poem and of the poet in the world. Through an ensemble of moves, displacements, and encounters, Philippe Beck’s poetry explores the possibility of what he calls ‘rhumanité’/‘rhumanity’, that is, the possibility of another renewed humanity. Beck often quotes Osip Mandelstam saying that a poem is what wakes up the listener or reader in the middle of each word, and his own poems can be read as a sequence of propositions against what he calls a ‘narcotic effect of language’ (‘un effet narcotique du langage’) (2023b: 389–90) when ‘the Ear is the hero of the everyday’ (‘L’Oreille est le héro du quotidien’) (2023b: 373).<br/>The critical reception of Beck’s work has been marked by two important milestones: a colloquium at Cerisy-La-Salle in 2014 (see Barbéris and Tessier 2014) and, ten years later, an international conference held at the Université Paris Cité (see Dickow and Zimmermann 2024).<br/>This interview – as well as the translations of four poems from Ryrkaïpii which follow – stem from conversations that occurred in the context of Beck’s tenure as writer-in-residence at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in September 2024.